The War Was in a Yellow Star
by JPalmerGirl
Summary: What if Steve wasn't being totally honest about his history, his background? What if his father hadn't been a dead war vet and his mom hadn't died from pneumonia? What is the real reason that Steve hates bullies? Maybe because of the way he watched Nazis kill his people. (Just a one-shot, might become more.)


The Chosen People, they were The Chosen People. Those were the only true words of comfort that Esther Cohen could whisper to her child as she rocked him gently in his father's old rocking chair. Her only child, Avram was just five, so skinny, sickly and frail. She knew that he wouldn't survive long in the camps. They had come for her husband, Boris, just a few months earlier. It had been only a matter of time until they came for Esther and Avram as well. She would lose him to ghetto as she went off to work, she knew as they took both mother and child away, that she would never see her baby again. Esther hopes. She hopes that his death will be quick. It would be too much to hope for him to be alive, hope for things like that, never happened. Instead she hoped that because of his blonde hair and blue eyes, they might grant him a merciful death. Maybe a bullet just on its mark or the gas turned on high. So he could die peacefully and she held to her hope. Even as she watched her baby carted away from her. She clung to her shreds of hope like a lifeline, fingers curled in them. As if they could just slip away from her. She dreamt of her child even as they cut her hair and tattooed her arm. She didn't last long, just a year and a half in Auschwitz. It was eventually sickness that did her in. She dreamt of her lost baby in her last moments, visions of the five year old playing in front of her eyelids. She wondered how he had grown. She dies like a mother should, her baby's name playing like he used too, on her lips.

Avram did as he was told, he saw death as the Nazis he'd once seen as men, killed his people mercilessly. The surprisingly perceptive, then eight year old wondered if mercy actually existed in the world, because it sure as hell didn't exist in the camps. Then he would remember, mercy was for people. They weren't supposed to be people anymore. He wanted to forgive them. To forgive them of the Nazis of their fake smiles and the pain they inflicted upon him. It was in his nature to forgive, even then. He never forgave them, not after he watched them tug a little boy named Aryet out of the bed that they all shared. He was there, watching after all the others had turned away. Avram was watching as the nameless Nazi put a bullet through the head of a child, younger than he. The body twitched, even after the Nazi had left, the body twitched, eyes glassy and lifeless. Later, as the young blonde boy was pressed against several other skeletal forms, he wondered.

When had he stopped crying for the dead?

Avram was just about fourteen when he first met Dr. Abraham Erskine. The man was a Jew, like him and he was shocked into silence as he watched a Nazi lead the older man through the camp. He remained silent as the Nazis lined up to stand in front of the doctor, shoulder to shoulder. The older Jew remained silent as he looked at them, studied them thoroughly. Then he just shook his head and turned away, he and the other Nazi walked away swiftly. Avram was supposed to return to his work but he instead saw a folder left abandoned on the ground. Then, he did the unthinkable. He ran after the Nazi and the older doctor. He didn't think otherwise as he handed the older men the folder. The Nazi looked disgusted, revolted at having touched the same thing as a Jew. While the older man looked at Avram with a perplexed look upon his face, an unspoken question on his lips as he nodded to the Nazi and motioned for the young Jewish child to follow him.

"What is your name?"

Avram blinked in surprise as the older doctor addressed him, as they walked nearer and nearer to the chambers and buildings, he blanched and began to sweat profusely. Were they taking him off to be killed? Would he really care? He had nothing left anyway. But instead of dwelling, he tried to focus on the doctor who was staring at him, expectantly.

"27746, sir." Avram whispered, and the older doctor furrowed his brow and shook his head. The younger Jew stilled, afraid he had done something wrong already.

"No, not your number. Your name, dear boy." Dr. Erskine stopped and turned to kneel at Avram's height. Living in the ghetto had stunted him, poor thing. He looked like a nine year old at age fourteen.

"Avram..." The boy whispered, meeting the doctor's kind and caring brown eyes, eyes that Avram had always imagined that his father would've had.

"Last name?"

"Cohen."

"Good. Now tell me, dear boy. If I could get you out of here, would you help me win a war?" Dr. Abraham Erskine asked the young Jewish boy, Avram Cohen. He said yes.

Avram Cohen was fifteen when he became Steve Rogers and entered the American land that he was sworn to protect. He became Captain America that same year, they made the skinny, stunted Jewish boy into a strong, manly American. Avram Cohen died in that concentration camp at the age of fifteen. He was gone. Just like his mother and most of his people. At least he'd found a way to get even, he was going to destroy Hitler. To destroy the destroyer of his people. Even though he knew that he couldn't go through with it, he wasn't a bully. He wouldn't stoop to that disgusting man's level. He remembered his mindset as he leapt atop of that grenade. He was remembering the corpses in the camp, he knew that he was going to die anyway, so he did it. Only to realize that he wasn't in the camp and that he wasn't dead. It was a dummy grenade that decided his entire future.

Steve Rogers was sixteen when Dr. Erskine was murdered by a Nazi, for a moment, all Steve could see was his mother, his father as he watched the man who'd mentored him, die in his arms, bleeding from a wound that he'd seen all too often in the concentration camp. He never wanted to see such vivid red again, but now it was all over his hands. When there was no one around to see, the blonde man cradled the corpse of his mentor and began to sing a song that he'd heard being sung throughout the camp and ghettos when there were no Nazis around to listen.

_"Never say that you are on your final way,_

_Though lead gray skies blot out the blue of day._

_The hour will come at last for which we all long,_

_A drumbeat for our steps saying, "We live on!"_

Steve sang gently, stroking his trembling hands through the older man's hair. He could remember his own blond locks, so matted with blood and dirt that their light hue had been utterly destroyed and forgotten.

_"From green lands of palms to white lands of snow,_

_We come bearing our hurt and our pain,_

_And wherever there is a spurt of our blood,_

_There will sprout our courage, our rebirth."_

Steve sang for all those children that were felled by the thunder of the guns, by the breath of poisonous gases, by the silent, deadly grip of starvation or disease. He sang and cried for them all. He cried for the mother and father that he didn't remember. The mother and father that were surely dead.

"_The morning sun will gild our today,_

_And our yesterday will fade with our foes,_

_Yet, if the sun delays in its scheduled rise,_

_This song must go as password from generation to generation."_

Steve vowed that his people's struggle, their strife would not go unavenged. He hated bullies like Hitler, he hated them with a passion. Steve's hand unconsciously drifted to his right wrist, his number was tattooed there. The skin had grown over the old ink and though it was faded slightly, it still remained intact and readable. Like his once destroyed heart.

"_This song is written with blood and not with lead,_

_It's not the song that birds sing freely,_

_This one has people midst collapsing walls,_

_This song, sung with grenades in our hands."_

Steve Rogers was seventeen when he fell in love with a British officer named Peggy. She had red hair that shown like the sun and green eyes that sparkled like emeralds. He wondered if she cried for him when he had to break off their date as his plane crashed into the icy waters of the Arctic. As the plane touched down, he smiled. He saw his mother's smiling face, arms strong, body curvy as it had never been in life. His father, brave and strong, blonde hair shining just like his own as he welcomed him home. But he didn't die that day, instead he woke up seventy years later.

"We aren't soldiers!"

When Tony Stark threw that barb in his face, Steve stiffened as he looked at his hands. Was he a soldier? The frightened little half-dead Jewish boy named Avram Cohen was dead, he wasn't a soldier. So what right did that give Steve Rogers to be one. Even after seventy years, his number hadn't changed, he still was the same. Nobody heard his broken statement to himself after Tony had spoken.

"Neither am I..."


End file.
